Nothing Divine In Hampton U. Rape Defense

Jim Spencer

Late Tuesday afternoon a jury acquitted three male basketball players at Hampton University of raping one of the school's female basketball players.

Justice has spoken: These men are innocent of any crime. But they are hardly the innocents that their pious post-trial celebration suggested.

``Praise the name of Jesus,'' the ballplayers' fans yelled after the verdict.

OK, praise Jesus. But don't pretend that Jesus would have condoned what the defendants admitted doing.

The jurors accepted the most primal rape defense imaginable. It was more than the old ``she wanted it'' excuse. The story the defendants told under oath, the story that the jury accepted, was that she wanted it from two men in a row without having to be asked for it.

I apologize if that sounds crude, but this whole episode was as raw as it gets.

The defendants testified that the method of seduction in this supposedly consensual group sex was indecent exposure. Defendant Derrick Powell said he exposed himself to the woman during a conversation. Powell said she asked him to do it again, and he did.

That, according to the defense, was all it took. The woman supposedly agreed to enter a dormitory after visiting hours. Once inside, she supposedly took off her clothes and had sexual intercourse with Powell and Weldon Parham.

Just like that. No sweet talk. No kisses. No hugs. Not even any verbal encouragement. To hear the defendants tell it, this was pure old requited lust with the woman as the aggressor. The defendants claimed that after twice viewing Powell's private parts, the 19-year-old woman ``just lay down and did it.''

This sounds like no woman I've ever heard of. It sounds strangely like those male fantasy letters that you find in girlie magazines, the ones that begin, ``I'm a student at a small Midwestern university, and I can't believe what happened to me one night last semester . . .''

The jury accepted it, in part because of glaring weaknesses in the prosecution's case. The woman knew the defendants. She had talked to all three before they allegedly dragged her into a dorm room where two of them held her down while one and then another raped her. During cross-examination by the defense lawyer, she indicated that she had had sex with one of the defendants on another occasion.

Also, the alleged assault produced none of the bruises and other physical trauma usually associated with rape. Two of the victim's friends were waiting outside the dormitory but never heard her call for help. Nor did she report the alleged rape right after it occurred. Her explanation was that her attempt to scream was muffled by an assailant and that as a child she reported being sexually molested by her step-father and nothing happened.

Something happened here. But the facts cast too much reasonable doubt to justify a conviction.

That didn't make the defendants' celebration any more savory.

``I feel great,'' Powell told Daily Press reporter Cheryl Reed outside the courtroom. ``I want to thank the Lord for that victory because the devil almost had it.''

I wonder which lord and devil he's talking about. Powell and his partners testified that at one point during this tragedy they turned on the lights to look at the victim's genitals and to comment on them.

Exhibitionism and voyeurism are not the bedrocks of Christianity. Confession and forgiveness are. Publicly, Powell, Parham and Marvin Childs never admitted that they did anything wrong, much less asked for absolution.

So my response to the prospect of divine intervention on their behalf is the same as the skeptical response of the woman's aunt to the men's defense: